Barbell Shrugged - Scientific Principles of Strength Training w/ Chad Wesley Smith - 285

Episode Date: November 1, 2017

Chad Wesley Smith is the owner/founder of Juggernaut Training Systems and one of the most accomplished strength athletes of recent years. With a background in track and field, Smith took his 2 collegiate national championships and continued his success in powerlifting and strongman. Today we discuss Chad’s 7 Scientific Principles of Strength Training 1. Specificity — Training designed to achieve a particular outcome 2. Overload — Is training stimulating enough to drive neural adaptation? Training must become harder overtime through more volume and more weight. 3. Fatigue management — Your recovery process: Besides deload days and proper nutrition and sleep, should include adaptive recovery strategies like ice baths, massages, etc. 4. SRA (Stimulus Recovery Adaptation) — Your training process: Frequency and duration of training and recovery. 5. Variation — Avoid staleness by shifting phases. Keep in mind variation should always be in context with Specificity (principle #1). 6. Phase potentiation — Make the most of each training phase. 7. Individual differences — We're similar but not "the same" Enjoy! -Mike, Doug and Team Barbell Shrugged   Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Barbell Shrugged helps people get better. Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. Find Barbell Shrugged here: Website: http://www.BarbellShrugged.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellshruggedpodcast

Being eight or nine years old, trying out for getting ready for Pop Warner football the first time, my mom said I was bungee-courting myself to trees in the backyard to do resisted sprints. I probably watched Rocky IV training montage too many times. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson, Kenny Kane, and we're up here in Orange County hanging out with Chad Wesley Smith at his home, hanging out in the backyard. New spot for training. New spot for everything.

Yeah, I just moved in last week. So we're here. We get to see everything just fresh. Yeah, I was still trying to clean the place up when you guys drove up this morning. So good job. The illusion of organization is present. Yeah, we know all about it. And if people don't know who you are by your name, I'm sure they recognize juggernaut training systems. And did write this book scientific principles of strength training and we're going to dig into that today i'm i'm personally really interested in learning about

what might differ between weightlifters and powerlifters because we definitely hear both uh coaches from both sports make comments about the other sport and it's you know it can be confusing at times and you're you are leading an organization that handles both types of athletes so i'm curious about that yeah i think a lot of times people get caught up on methods you know front squat is better than back squat or high bar is better than low bar five by five is the best way to do everything that type of thing but i'm really curious from you um with this book in mind like what are the underlying principles of strength training that apply to everyone across the board and how to use

those principles to make decisions in very specific situations all right and take taking that a little bit further as you make decisions specifically for general populations versus competitive populations because that's where a lot of this confusion I think in the market can be created. So. I have to say with that one too, like we don't deal that much really, if at all with general population stuff. I mean, in our online coaching,

there's definitely folks who don't compete, but they're still training to raise their one rep max, but I'll do the best I can with that. Excellent. How did you get started? What brought you into, I mean, I understand you were a shot putter. You were into power sports in the past.

What got you interested in studying the subject and becoming a powerlifter and strongman? Yeah, so I've always been really interested in studying the subject from being, I think, eight or nine years old, trying out for getting ready for Pop Warner football the first time. Mom said I was like bungee courting myself to trees in the backyard to do like resisted sprints. I probably watched Rocky IV training montage too many times. But I've written my own training program since I was 14 years old. More or less written my own since then. So it's something I've always been very interested in. So now more than 17 years I've been kind of training on my own accord.

Through the shot put in college was a two-time collegiate national champion 17 years I've been training on my own accord. Through the shot put in college was a two-time collegiate national champion there and through for one year as a post-collegiate at the same time I'd started Juggernaut, which eight-year anniversary of Juggernaut, pretty much right now. So I still tried to throw the first year that I was we'd opened the gym, but working 60-70 hours a week and then trying to train full-time for an Olympic sport was it was challenging I've seen that quite a few times people like I want to go to the CrossFit Games I want to be I want

to win I want me on the podium for weightlifting I'll open my own gym I'm like no yeah so was that an aspiration to go to the Olympics? Um, yeah, you know, I had thrown an Olympic A standard at the time, which would have been for the 2000, like far enough to go to the 2012 Olympics. But America is just stacked in the shop. But we, uh, yeah, gold and silver at the last Olympics, any given year, we probably have six to seven of the top 10 in the world and only three guys go so very very tough team to make I mean I'd say equivalent of like Jamaican 100 meter yeah uh sprint team maybe the toughest uh team to make for the U.S. you'd be 10th best in the

world not go yeah why do you think that is why do you think that's sports so stacked in the U.S. um at least compared to like let's say, weightlifting, and I think there's a lot of parallels between throwing and weightlifting, actually a lot more parallels there than powerlifting and weightlifting, is that shot put gets early exposure. I started throwing the shot put when I was eight years old. Almost everyone who's going to the Olympics probably started competing at the latest as a freshman in high school.

So they're getting a long time of development there. Where we're not quite as good in the discus, the hammer, the javelin, where hammer and javelin is later exposure, very similar issues that weightlifting faces. And I think it just lends itself to a bit broader population like America's two best shot putters right now one guy Ryan Krauser broke the Olympic record uh six foot eight three hundred and ten pounds other guy Joe Kovacs uh just was silver at world championships a couple weeks ago he's 5'11 290 you know so very wide body type range but you get these really explosive guys maybe a little too short to play football or whatever whatever it was and they're

able to really excel there but yeah america is dynasty like oftentimes they're talking about like sweeping the olympics or sweeping world championships they haven't pulled it off yet but one of the most um difficult maneuvers i've ever had to do as a coach trainer is I went down to help at Chula Vesta at the Olympic Training Center. I worked with some of the U.S. members, I don't know, maybe seven, eight years ago. And I hadn't worked with athletes that size. And I was just trying to get one of them into a little bit of a posterior tilt and it was it like suddenly everything that I've been working towards a coach was compromised and I just felt so like I'm like just trying to like jump on them and I'm like 160 wet I couldn't get any movement and they're like what's this guy doing?

Yeah those guys are pretty pretty freakish athletes. So how did you transition out of track and field and into powerlifting yeah so as i kind of finished my track career my coach from high school and coach me in high school and college passed away from cancer shortly after i graduated college so between no coach and no time i was like well i'm already strong so i can just cut half the training out and now i just lift instead of throwing and lifting Raw power lifting at the time. This was October 2010. I did my first meet was So tiny compared to what it is now. The first meet I ever did was the first ever USPA meet which

Is probably the second biggest Federation now and I think it was 36 people in a high school gymnasium, San Luis Obispo. And now you can go to USPA meet every weekend within an hour drive from here, and there's 60 lifters, 90, 120. And so it was fun to kind of be on the forefront of that, and I just took to it quickly. I squatted 800 pounds my first meet. I had a very long, hard training background before that. I trained for six months, about 800. That's pretty common, right?

Yeah, so I just got into it and it was fun and just kind of took off from there. Did you have a scientific understanding of how to train before that or did you start powerlifting, get into it, and then start doing research and reading and studying uh yes and no i mean i definitely thought that i did i like i said i've been i did my first meet when i was 23 uh yeah no 24 and 24 and i'd been writing my own training at that point for for 10 years And I'd read a ton and read all the books that everyone says that they read. Super training, scientific principles of, or science and practice of strength training. But no one actually understands them. And particularly at that point in my career, I did not understand them. But I had been coaching, I coached high

school football on track while I was in college and ran the off-season program there. So I'd been coaching for four or five years and I was writing, you know, good programs, good enough programs for me to squat 800 pounds. But compared to the understanding I have of the training process now, it's nowhere, nowhere close. And I was really always a sport performance coach first and I competed in powerlifting, but I didn't really coach powerlifting at that point so I was sort of my only guinea pig for powerlifting training but in the seven years since then I've gotten exposed to so many more people like Dr. Isretel, Dr. Hoffman, the co-authors of

of scientific principles, other lifters, my own trial and error coaching hundreds and hundreds of powerlifters now that the scientific knowledge base and my understanding of what is important to understand and what was sort of superfluous knowledge has grown a lot. So when you say people don't understand the principles they get from those higher level books, like super training is super technical. There's a lot of information in super training. I've never seen that book it's super dense um you know i could read that book 20 times and not feel like i got it all and i and i feel like i have a pretty good understanding of kind of what's going on i've been training for 20 years i've you know got my degrees i study constantly um so what

do you mean people don't understand super training and why do you think you understand it at a different level uh well the the language in it is incredibly dense. And I'd say it's in English, but it's not written in human. It's translated Russian into English, but it's rough. And the only reason I think that I gained a better understanding of it is because I got exposed to someone, James Smith, who's a phenomenal coach and consultant for a lot of high-level athletes and tactical Navy SEAL special forces kind of stuff now. He was a guy who clearly understood it and I had the opportunity to employ him for a year in 2011 into 2012 and see him put these ideas

into practice, know when you read them on the page you have to read it over and over and over and you're trying to kind of put it together but if you don't have the my degree is in history so you know without the anatomy physiology background plus understanding like statistics physics all all these different fields I just it wasn't clicking like I was maybe close on some stuff, but off the mark. And then I saw him do it and actually put it into programs, and I was like, oh, it's the most intuitive answer, basically, almost every time.

And once he kind of guided, started me down the path. It's always intuitive after you know. Yeah, exactly. Of course, it's all intuitive. Yeah, and yeah, so once I saw him put it into practice, that really clicked for me. It was like, I've been overthinking this stuff so much. We tend to do that. Yeah, and the programming, you know, I have some of my old training journals, even from when I was 15, 16 years old, or when I started coaching when I was 19 and 20, and I look I started coaching when I was 19 and 20. And I look at the programs that I wrote and they're so elaborate, you know, different tempo schemes

and just, you know, such elaborate exercise variation. I look at the stuff I write now and it seems so simple, but it's so much more effective too. You're not learning something new and feeling obligated to put it in your program. Like I remember doing similar things. Like you learn about tempo

and it's like, I got to do tempo. All the time. Some of that's good. Like some of that's, you, you, you learn something new, you go try it out, you know what it feels like and all that. But, but yeah, you can overdo it. I think it's all an important part of the process for coaches, athletes, people in other fields, that time of experimentation. Cause if you don't go through that you know how

are you ever going to understand well this this was good and this this was bad and i think the more important thing and the thing we touch on a lot in this book is why is it effective or why is it you know less or more or less effective you know what are some of the major differences so you said that if you look at a training program you wrote a decade ago versus now, it's much simpler. What are some prime examples of things that you've learned over time that we would see different in your programming now? Yeah. You know, one of the biggest ones would be a more strategic use of exercise variation. So a better understanding of specificity.

And those are kind of two you know opposite sides of the same coin uh when i was a shot putter i had very very high general strength qualities and general explosive qualities numbers like a 36 inch vertical and weighed 290 pounds and was doing stuff that would have indicated... It's just a real crack up because you're so calm and you just don't seem like the guy that's jumping out of the ceiling. It's sort of nonchalant. Oh, shit, that's a big...

That's a big man. Some people might not know how good that is. That's a very high vertical jump, especially for someone who's approaching 300 pounds. That's like comparing it to squatting. Like you say you squat 800 your first time out the gate. Like you might have more context with like, oh, that's heavy. It's the same thing with a vertical jump.

Like that's a big vertical jump. Well, basketball players aren't doing that. Yeah, my senior year of college, I dunked a four kilo medicine ball with two hands. Of course you did. Off like one step. Why wouldn't you? No, I don't want a basketball. So I had these really high general qualities that would have indicated I should be throwing 71, 72 feet in the shot put.

But I was only throwing 64, 65 feet. And sort of the disconnect in that was this idea of special strength. And understanding what really has high transfer to the sporting result. And it wasn't different bench variation, different squat variation, different types of jumps all the time. Even though that has its place and it's all part of a bigger picture and process, for me it would have been throwing overweight shots, underweight shots, tons of different rotational type of exercises. So the emphasis on specificity versus variation was off then.

My understanding of a phasic structure to training, and this is going to be true of pretty much anyone who's, I think, young in what they're doing, is they want their result now. And it's tough to understand that I can, you know, dig down a little bit to build a greater foundation. And in the long term, that's going to allow me to build a higher peak, you know, a higher top to my skyscraper. But this week and next week when i really want to pr and this was probably thankfully before instagram and stuff because i think that drives that desire so much more yeah but i don't post the pr every friday i go into a deep depression over the weekend

and yeah so that understanding of of proper phasic structure and delayed gratification, which is probably just a life skill to be learned more so than just a training skill, I'd think that those were probably the biggest differences. I was trying to test too much then rather than build, and it was always something new, and most of those new things were too general to have that level of transfer that I needed. How do you communicate that to your athletes? You know, because how do you, how do you explain that to a 20 year old? Like, Hey man, slow your roll. We're going to stick with this program because that happens. I mean, I've had athletes where I'm like,

there's your program, do it. And then they're like sneak into a weightlifting class and do a bunch of jerks. I'm like, no, you're not supposed to do jerks for like six weeks. What are you doing? Yeah. I think some of it, probably the biggest, the biggest part of it is credibility at this point that, and, and almost self-selection that, that the athlete is selecting me because they've watched the videos and they've read the book and they understand that, you know, they understand like, this is the way that I want to do it. So they seek me out to do it that way. And then when it's like, well, I did this to squat 970 or I had, you know, I've had, I think, seven, eight guys squat over 800, six bench over 500,

and another seven or eight pull over 800. And they say, well, this is how this guy did it. Or even the female lifters, Marissa, world record, world champion. Kristen has the American record. And it's like, well, I have a 138-pound girl who's squatting as much as you, and she does it this way.

She's squatting more than me. So I think that's probably the biggest part of it. And just explaining the process to it as well. And if they can understand that I put a ton of thought into that process, explaining the process to it as well. And if they can understand, you know, that I put a ton of thought into that process, I think it's easier for them to accept, like, this is the way to do it.

I'm not just, you know, shooting from the hip with it. Yeah, like right here in the first half we're covering, like, the development of you as an athlete and a coach and the development of your understanding of programming and even how to, like, approach the athletes. I want want to take a break and when we come back from the break you're actually going to be teaching doug and all of us but doug's gonna be demoing how does how you teach squatting different than most if you're listening audio only oh then then we're very obviously as mike said going to be posting a video where it's a demonstration so you'll be missing out on that demonstration and we come back from the second half you'll be missing out on that demonstration.

When we come back from the second half, we'll be talking about the demo, and you might not have full context of what the hell just happened. So go watch the video. That way you know what's going on. And last, a really cool part of the video is Chad dunks Michael into a basketball hoop at the end of the lift. It's pretty spectacular. 100%. And we're back. And Chad just taught Doug how to squat

because Doug was totally screwing it up. I've never squatted before. Never squatted before. Finally. Finally fixed. You know, one of the things I took away from that was, and it was a big reminder of squatting is you're building your legs, your leg strength.

It's not, there's so much emphasis on hips, hips, hips. It's a good reminder to go, hey, this is all one unit and how do we move it that way. Yeah, just bend your knees and stand up. Ain't too much to it. There's all the base fundamental mechanics of movement, but one of the points that I believe you're trying to make was what are you trying to accomplish? If you're a weightlifter and you're going to catch your 100% one rep max on your shoulders, you've got to be vertical. And to stand up with that weight and not dump it forward. Like you can't let your butt slip back and bend over and your elbows drop. Like you got to stay vertical and use your fucking quads to, to stand up without losing the weight.

And I think that's a particularly like important concept to understand as you get outside of training for powerlifting or training for weightlifting. the specificity there is very easy to understand. Squat, bench, deadlift, specific to powerlifting. Snatch, clean and jerk, specific to weightlifting. But as you get into athletic populations, football players, MMA, basketball, whatever it is, is that people get into these debates about, well, front squat is more functional than back squat or whatever. And it's functional for what?

Because a basketball player's function is to play basketball. So you have to do things that are going to develop that. And these exercises are all general means to that. So I think understanding the three principles I try and guide, that stuff is can the athlete effectively execute the exercises? Is their technique good enough so they're not going to hurt themselves can they put some weight on the bar to create some strength stimulus and does it fit within the context of their bigger plan i think i think we talk about like just thinking about the functionality piece front back front versus back squat i mean if

you're not competing with a barbell it's technically technically not functional at all. Yeah, it's all general exercise. All general exercise, but it's simple as a strength coach working with athletes and if you have to report to a head coach and say, well, these guys improved this much, they put this much on their squat, this much on their bench, this much on their jumps, that's good, but some of the lifting stuff, it's like it needs to be that's a means to an end of improved movement yeah what are some of your favorite populations to have worked with just through the years because you just

mentioned you know a variety of athletes and obviously you're very focused on weightlifting but outside of the weightlifting communities where are some of the athletes that you really enjoy working with? You know, my real start in coaching was with football, track and field, and volleyball, and jiu-jitsu. I had a great group of jiu-jitsu guys like Romelu Baral, Kyron Gracie, like really high-level black belts, and that was just a really fun group to have so many elite guys pushing each other. But I was kind of done everything, water polo, swimming, all over the place. Is like the UFC and mixed

martial arts kind of like one of your favorites outside of the weightlifting community? You know the MMA stuff is tough because and it would go to some of probably take us to off track but the idea of program management and this would come into play with CrossFit a lot too, you have so many different parts to deal with. If those coaches aren't communicating with each other, it becomes very, very difficult. And I think it's a mistake that CrossFitters make is they're on this weightlifting program and this endurance program and this skill program. And it's all over the place, but it's like when you are going online to pull these five different programs down those coaches didn't talk to each other and if they all want to go high volume at the same time like you're going to get screwed at the end of the day

and the same thing happens with mma if the strength coach the wrestling coach the the you know boxing coach and and stuff don't all talk to each other you you run into a real issue. So that kind of always made training MMA type of guys tough. Yeah. I have a follow up question to that. Yeah. What's one of the more difficult coaching situations you've been in with your more experienced lifters that pushed you?

Like where you found yourself going, okay, whether it be like a psycho-emotional issue or just a technical issue. Yeah. The toughest thing I'd say is probably dealing with injuries. You know, trying to get guys to work around injuries. Because some of the, you know, Marissa is dealing with injury right now. She's the best lifter I coach.

You know, third overall by best lifter at IPF World Record in our weight class. And we're trying to work around this glute injury and having guys who are squatting 800, 900 pounds. Just shit starts to hurt. And being able to find solutions that can keep them engaged mentally while also you know progressing or at least maintaining physically and then being able to sort of pivot their goals like okay well you know your elbows beat up so the bench training's got to get put on the back burner a little bit we can create this solution whether it's reduced range of motion or slingshot or whatever it is well now we can put more attention to this other part of part of of things, you know, more deadlift, more squat attention, whatever it is.

You listed off a variety of sports that you, you've coached and that's based on the fact that you can coach that many sports is because you understand the underlying principles. What are, what are some principles that most people are overlooking, you think? It might not be so much overlooking as it is incorrectly prioritizing. In our book, Scientific Principles of Strength Training, we go through it in order and first is specificity. And specificity is going to create the framework in which all other decisions are are made because you could make a lot of you know smart training decisions but if it's for you could make smart training decisions for a

triathlete that are terrible for a powerlifter or vice versa so if you don't take and that's obviously extreme example but if you don't take specificity into consideration that's that's going to be a big problem. So I think that a lot of people will take individual differences, which is our seventh and final principle, and put that up near the top. Everyone wants to think they're a special snowflake and that kind of training doesn't work for me, is wrong to think. Because it's not that the training is going to differ so much by type from person to person, different weight classes, different levels of experience,

male to female, drug use to drug-free type of stuff. It's that it's going to vary much more by magnitude of training than by type of training. But I think everyone wants to think that they need this special exercise, but the individual differences tend to be fairly detailed changes. Is it possible to take specificity too far? Having done MMA and Jiu-Jitsu and wrestling for a long time, I've heard people in those various sports say, well, I'm never going to do a one rep max in a fight. Why do I need gonna do a one rep max in a fight. Why do I need to do a one rep max in training? Like it's not a raw strength sport.

Which there's some rationale there, but there's also a lot of rationale the other way too. Yeah, I think people take specificity too far all the time because they latch onto the idea that specificity is the number one principle, and so then they they violate other principles down down the road most likely fatigue management is going to become the issue there you know for a powerlifter or weightlifter if

they are specificity specificity specificity well what's that mean one rep max squat bench deadlift one rep max snatch clean jerk front squat you know and that's all they do they're going to miss out on the the they're probably going to become over trained they're going to miss out on variation and how variation can help them avoid adaptive resistance meaning the longer you do something the less effective it becomes over time and they're going to miss out on the benefits of a phase potentiation a phasic structure of training, meaning taking one phase of training to increase the potential of the subsequent phase.

And the way that we do that for powerlifting is hypertrophy strength peaking. We build a bigger muscle, then teach that bigger muscle how to produce more force, then teach that bigger, more force-producing muscle the technique of the one rep max and the neural qualities that come along with it and you know infinitely repeat that process in different proportions based on the athlete's different levels so that's more the the art of coaching and programming is like how to take all these fundamental principles and how much of each one to be using at any given time based on the outcome you're trying to achieve yeah and i think art is an important word to it because the last couple of years, you know, there's so much trending towards evidence-based practice and all that stuff is great and studies and stuff are certainly very helpful to inform

the training process, but the human body is such a incredibly complex organism. And then you put the complexity of the athlete's life on top of that and they're out of gym stress you know their intrapersonal differences in recovery abilities whether that's you know changes in diet changes in sleep changes in in stress from you know work significant other school whatever it may be and and that's always going to be kind of the that constant ebb and flow of stuff where the principals don't change but again the magnitude of their application does okay so so specificity was the the first major principle you you sprinkled in a couple other things but like what would be like good number two and three yeah so going down

line specificity number one number two overload The principle of overload is going to dictate that training must, is training significantly stimulating enough? Is it hard enough to drive adaptation? If it's too light to make you stronger, if it's not voluminous enough to increase work capacity or increase muscle size, if it's not heavy enough to drive neural adaptation and the timing of all these different things is certainly appropriate. And then the training must become harder over time. You know, if you bench 300 pounds right now for one, doing 300 for one three months from now, six months from now, a year from now, well, how is that going to get you to 315? You know, you have to be increasing some of those qualities, more volume, more weight on the bar. You can get into things like density of the training for other sports, velocity and whatnot. Of course, technical adaptations along the way. And then after that, fatigue management.

Hard training is great. Hard training is very important. Smart training is very hard training. But if you just push, push, push, push, push, what's going to be eventually the end result of that? Either running into these issues of too much directed adaptation where you've done the same thing too long and it loses its effectiveness, overuse, injury, staleness, you know the recovery process and and it's gonna catch up to you or the failure to recovery is gonna catch up to you and you're gonna get to the point where you need to deload and and deloads and light days are of course important to fatigue management along with recovery adaptive

strategies whether that's massage, active release, grass and ice baths, contrast shower, all that stuff on top of proper diet and nutrition or proper diet and sleep. And if someone's doing those three principles really well, they're going to have a very, very good program. And something like Bulgarian system does those three things, you know, the first two things exceptionally well. The third thing, eh, not so great, but there are ways to sort of circumvent, ways to pharmaceutically circumvent some of the fatigue management issue to sort of help out with that. But, you know, if people are nailing those those first three they're doing a great job

i was just gonna say like well these principles seem to overlap i know you've really worked with competitive populations but these are principles i think that are very useful for non-competitive athletes i think these are like kind of universally sound oh i i totally agree with you and thank you and i think with with the non-competitive population and general population you know the first thing specificity is what's changing it's it's what whatever you put in as your goal for the general population you know lose lose weight build muscle you know be able to stand up paddleboard better whatever it is you know then that goal is gonna

frame the decisions down down the line from that I hire you to to make me a better paddleboarder um I'd have to do some research but I like the strangest thing like oh what's Mike doing now well Chad's coaching him on paddleboard I think we should do that just so it's a thing. I'll have to do some research on that one. Then we can do drug testing. He's recovering too quickly. He's the first person disqualified for international battle boarding for JQs. Coach Chad, how do you answer that one?

I wasn't with him all the other hours of the day. Tainted supplements always. We had specificity overload. It was so I could perform better in the bedroom. I was taking the pills from the gas station. I would pay more money for it than paddle boarding. Bedroom performance, which Chad West has been doing. That'd be a better selling book, I think.

But yeah, so going through the list were specificity, principle overload, fatigue management. Then the next one is SRA, stimulus recovery adaptation, which is really just a fancy way for me to sound smarter than I am by describing the training process. You introduce a stimulus and then your body has to have time to recover and adapt to that. The different lengths of that recovery and adaptation process is what's going to kind of dictate optimal frequency for that athlete. Different lifts, different physical qualities are going to have a different length SRA curve. As I draw my kind of air graph, we introduce the stimulus. Fatigue is generated from that.

You recover and adapt to slightly improved levels of what you had before. And then you do it again. If the time becomes too long, you go up and then you start to become detrained again. If the time's too short, you know, you're not recovered enough and you haven't improved the abilities, you're training too frequently for that. You go from SRA to the principle of variation. And I said variation, specificity, kind of two sides of the same coin. Variation is obviously very important because it's going to avoid staleness it's going to you know different phases of training are going to be better suited for

different types of exercises because of the goal of that phase shifting a little bit like for powerlifters you know high bar squats maybe a better option during hypertrophy training where you're going to be doing low bar squats and peaking because that's what you do in competition but high bar squats can tolerate more volume you're going to build up more leg strength isn't going to interfere with the deadlift training quite as much so variation has its place but you can't prioritize variation over specificity then the next one would be do you think about about variation as something you do within a range of specificity like your range for specificity is this big and then you can vary within that range of specificity certainly and that's going to take the individual into account a lot because the degree of variation,

that spectrum of exercises that we may use for, you know, 30 year old world elite power lifter is still fairly small. Their greatest variation is probably tens in the high bar squat or front squat because their most specific thing is one in knee wraps, low bar, back squat, where a less experienced athlete would have a greater range because more general training and more general movement qualities are going to be beneficial to them all the way down to a youth training situation which is going to broaden things even further and you know the one that really drove that home for me a couple years ago i was at a seminar at in la with uh ilia ilian and in it he talked through the translator about he started training for weightlifting when he was six years old he was like hyperactive so his mom would send him to the weightlifting club with his brother. And he, quote, I would run around the gym and do all the exercises.

And I don't think that six-year-old Ilya just had free reign of a Kazakh weightlifting gym. But to me, in understanding and having read about the process of acquiring sports mastery and Soviet Long-term training strategies that meant he did gymnastics swimming, you know Calisthenic drills track and field type of drills throwing jumping sprinting along with a ton of weightlifting Drills and then as he got older and older up and until the the final parts of his career Where he was essentially doing Bulgarian training and maybe some work from blocks that training became you know he cut out some exercises cut out some exercises or left them just to different parts of the year that he would have like a three month part of the year where he only did the lifts once a week he said and he would swim and play basketball and sort of refresh himself with very general training at that point I think that's something to note is people look at

Bulgarian and they have a two-year year training history and then they want to do that program because it produces this athlete. They don't remember that at eight years old you have to have been this physically active and the average American it's probably not the case. Yeah and that's Bulgarian system Smolov, Sheko, a lot of these programs even looking at my training my training you know marissa's training whatever whatever it is these really really elite lifters they're looking at what they do now rather than what they did to get there like marissa for example she started

gymnastics you know seven eight years old doing that until she was 15 or 16 and then had you know a 20-ish year long hypertrophy block of bodybuilding and physique training. So it's like, yeah, we could do very specific training now because of this massive base. But someone who follows this elite lifter on Instagram and, oh, I want to do what that person does, they're missing out on some very important parts of the process. I love your yard. You're hoarding all the avocados. You're hoarding all the avocados in California. I hear there's a shortage this year. There's a shortage. Yeah.

You've got helicopters over there too. But you've got two trees. I do. You just moved in. Do you have a plan for these avocados? I mean there are hundreds on this one right now. I was looking up into one of them and they were just everywhere. Yeah, I guess they were supposed to be ripe in like October I was told by then. Well now you're going to make all your money with avocados. Because they're like 15 bucks a pop right now I think. You've got a good backup plan.

Juggernaut falls through anytime soon. Totally, he can join the Mexican cartel. Thanks for joining us today, and thanks for having us down or up. Depends on where you came from. Kenny came down. We came up. There you go. But, you know, one of the things I really enjoyed today was the fact that the more experienced you become,

the more simple the focus is becoming. Oh yeah, these are like the three top training principles. And programming is getting simplified and things like that. And so I think it's really great for people who are coaching and programming to hear that. Thank you. Yeah, it's a good reminder of the basics. I came out of the world of strength and conditioning before I kind of got into the functional fitness space. And I don't hear as much about the core foundational principles nowadays than I used to when I was back even in college you know 10 or 15 years ago

so it's a good reminder of some of those principles. Yeah I think for me Chad like a real big walk away is a word you mentioned earlier which is intuition and the development of people's intuition as it relates to coaching and helping a variety of populations takes a lot of work so there has to be enough of a intellectual background to support that and there has to be enough like trial and error experimentation and then also that like relational quality but that's hard to achieve but i really appreciate that uh that idea of intuitive development as it relates to this stuff well cool guys thank you very much for having me on. Yeah, where can people find more about you?

JTSstrength.com is the main spot. Juggernaut Training Systems YouTube. And then for myself, Facebook and Instagram, at Juggernaut Training or at Chad Wesley Smith. Filling up your news feed all day. You've got a couple of books here you should check out. Also, my book, A Thoughtful Pursuit of Strength, a book I co-authored, Scientific Principles of Strength Training, and even our own podcast with me and Max Montana, The Jug Life Podcast.

The Jug Life. Check that one out as well. What up? All right. Make sure to go over to iTunes, five-star review, positive comment. And if you didn't figure it out yet, this is also on video, we've got special videos that isn't gonna be in the audio version,

go over to YouTube, hit the subscribe button so you get updated every time. Yeah, thanks Chad. Thanks Chad.